Persons who have work or other needs for standing for long periods of time or for walking on hard floor surfaces such as concrete or tile often experience problems with their feet and with fatigue. To accommodate such work needs and assist with reducing fatigue from standing or walking on hard surfaces, anti-fatigue mats have been developed to provide a cushioned surface on which to stand or walk. There are various types of anti-fatigue mats, including foam, gel-filled, foam rubber, and hard rubber. Each type provides alternative benefits and features, but generally, each type of mat provides a cushioned or resilient body to soften the surface on which the person stands or walks. For small area workstations, for example, at a machinery control station or a photocopy machine, single small area mats are satisfactory. However, there are often needs to cover a larger areas, such as a small room or hallway.
Individual stations may use a foam mat or a gel mat. Foam mats are readily manufactured but provide moderate support and moderate anti-fatigue while gel-filled offer superior support and anti-fatigue benefits. Foam rubber mats are suitable for industrial applications. Hard rubber mats may have interlocking pieces to assemble as a runner or to cover a large area.
While hard rubber mats with interlocking features may connect together to cover a large area, such may be unsatisfactory as lacking anti-fatigue properties. Foam mats having a resilient or cushioned base and an overlaid attached rubber surface are readily manufactured but have the drawback of not interlocking together satisfactorily. Die cutting of such foam mat to form the connecting members on side edges causes cupping in the side walls, and thereby reduces the effectiveness of the connection between adjacent tiles. Scuffing of footwear or wheeled traffic may also cause the rubber layer to delaminate or separate from the foam base.
Our pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/646,341 discloses modular rubber/foam-backed anti-fatigue tiles that connect together to cover an area as an anti-fatigue mat while the novel structure enables the mat to resist delamination of the rubber from the foam back during use of the tiles. It has been found that the interconnected modular tiles however tend to separate one from another during use of the mat in industrial areas with wheeled carrier devices such as carts, hand-trucks, and the like, rolling across the mat. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved interconnection of modular floor tiles to form large area mats that resist separation during use. It is to such that the present invention is directed.